A Hat in Time hopes to atone for the platforming sins of Donkey Kong 64

There's a general shortage of platformers on consoles not produced by Nintendo, and even the ones we get lack the thoroughness of a Banjo-Kazooie or a Mario 64. Modern platforms are too linear, Kaerlev argues, giving you little reason to stop and smell the roses.

There is a culprit in the killing of this genre, and Kaerlev is quick to identify it.

Yeah, Donkey Kong 64 is an awesome game, but sadly it was the last truly open-ended 3D platformer. If this game can make a triumphant return to less linear platformer games (looking at you, Mario Galaxy), I will be incredibly happy.

There was an incredible amount of things to do in each level in Donkey Kong 64, it was practically 5 games stacked on top of each other. I must have spent freakin' ages playing the classic DK minigame too! Great touch having that in there :)

To know what DK64 is like, think what Banjo Kazooie is like (only with 5 times the backtracking and, as a result, far less consistent sense of identifiable characterisation) more than you would think what Donkey Kong Country is like. One of the weird things about the N64 is that it didn't actually carry on the graphical slickness of the SNES DK game in any way. The N64 had blockyish graphics on the whole and they didn't appear to use a supercomputer this time to appear to be anything else. DK64, like Banjo Tooie, was a massive collectathon, interesting and still epic in its own right but a touch overkill. Conker's Bad Fur Day (which DID get the most out of the N64's graphics) made a welcome return to the original Banjo Kazooie simplicity.